Considering that such intercepts have been freely publicized by Canada and the U.S. for the last 60 years or so, I suspect the fact that Russian aircraft are normally the ones involved will not come as a huge surprise to the Canadian public or indeed anyone else — and especially not to the Russians, who after all are typically the guest of honour on these occasions.

Despite the occasional incomprehensible redaction (and a substantial number of other, sometimes understandable, ones), there's a lot of interesting material in the 140-page NSICOP report, which is the first annual report that the new committee has produced.

It's unfortunate therefore that the PDF provided by the government isn't electronically searchable. Compiling the document from scanned images was probably a security measure designed to guarantee that no redacted information can be recovered from the final document. That's sensible enough.

But it is possible to OCR the document afterwards to make it user-friendly as well as secure. It's not that hard.

As a public service, I hereby offer for free download what apparently no one in government thinks is possible, or at least worth doing: a searchable version of the report.